Oxymorons, Paradoxes, And Contradictory Statements

An oxymoron is two or more words that contradict themselves (e.g. "poor little rich girl" or "living dead"). A paradox is a phrase that contradicts itself (e.g. "A Cretan says 'All Cretans are liars'"). A paradox is also used to describe something that seems to be hypocritical.

Central theme

• '85 Radio Special Thank You - "We all sang a duet...", "...until they never let us out a full ten blocks later"
• 9 Secret Steps - The rules contradict themselves multiple times, eg. "Amputate the thought that says you shouldn't ever amputate the thought"
• Another First Kiss - It's an oxymoron to have "Another First" of a thing
• Chaos By Design - an oxymoron
• Counterfeit Fake and Counterfeit Faker
• Courage The Cowardly Dog
• Dr. Evil - "being wrong is right", "If his contradictions should attract you"
• Everything Right Is Wrong Again - "silent noise", "And now the song is over now" preceding the bridge.
• Got Getting Up So Down - "...I could do it in my sleep"
• Happy - The narrator becomes an "independent thinker" because he was told to be.
• The House At The Top Of The Tree - The events of the song are a temporal paradox: the potato chips are sent to appease the mice who were upset by the sound of the empty bag, which was emptied to send the chips to the mice.
• I Should Be Allowed To Think - The narrator speaks at length about being unable to express himself.
• I'm Not A Loser - Full of double and triple negatives
• Lazyhead And Sleepybones - The two characters "always disagree" on synonyms for the same things; "When Sleepybones says that something isn't / Lazyhead says 'it's not'"
• Now I Know - "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's when I stand, corrected, hat in hand", "But that's untrue, for there are two..."
• Number Three - "There's only two songs in me and I just wrote the third", "A poor man once told me that he can't afford to speak"
• Or So I Have Read - The chorus begins with "Everything you hear is a fact / And the opposite is also correct"
• Reprehensible - The narrator's story about himself includes forgetting the story he's currently telling.
• (She Was A) Hotel Detective In The Future - Refers to the future in the past tense
• Weep Day - "Every man is made of two opinions / Every woman has a second half", and the song describes various internally contradictory scenarios

Briefly mentioned

• 32 Footsteps - "32 new moons shining" (new moons do not shine), "32 lies my ears never saw" (ears do not see)
• Birdhouse In Your Soul - "I'm your only friend / I'm not your only friend...," "but really I'm not actually your friend / But I am..."
• Cage And Aquarium "Used to be different / Now you're the same"
• Cupid - "I'd kill myself, if I were somebody else"
• Daylight - "Awake and dreaming"
• D Is For Drums - "I can't find my thinking cap, I think it's lost!"
• Experimental Film - "The color of infinity inside an empty glass"
• Eyeball - "No, wait, ignore the thing / I just said, it wasn't true and this is"
• Garden Of Eden - "We're gonna build a new old car"
• Gudetama's Busy Days - "You had nothing and then you lost it"
• It Said Something - "Everything up is down"
• It Was A Very Good Year - "We would have sexual intercourse, while at the same time we would not have sexual intercourse".
• Istanbul (Not Constantinople) - "Old New York" is a bit of an oxymoron
• Lie Still, Little Bottle - "'There's no time for metaphors,' cried the little pill to me / He said, 'Life is a placebo masquerading as a simile'"
• London - "It's a secret between everyone and us"
• Maine - "Exhausted from oversleep", "the heaven below," "the hell from above"
• Mink Car - "Woke up in a beautiful dream"
• On The Drag - "I won't die until I'm dead" , "You're only happy when you're sad"
• One Everything - Describes a set-theory paradox in the verse that starts "What if you drew a giant circle"
• Push Back The Hands - "You would give up your right arm to go back to when you had a right arm"
• Reminder - "It's a reminder / He won't remember"
• Re-PETE Offender - "There is no echo here at all (There is no echo here at all)"
• A Self Called Nowhere - "Standing in my yard where they tore down the garage to make room for the torn-down garage" implies a causal loop.
• Snowball In Hell - "Money's all broke, and food's going hungry"
• Spiraling Shape - "Down, down, down you go" as the bass note inclines — a musical oxymoron
• A Stranger's Eye - "I was engrossed in it / This was exactly the type of thing that I would never read"
• Turtle Songs Of North America - "It may sound to you like something that isn't a sound at all"
• Whole Lot Of Glean - "We're never quitting this fight - Until it gets too hard "

Honorable mentions

• Best Of Spin The Dial - "I'm a paradox / A cultural paradox"
• I'm A Coward - In the words of John Flansburgh, "It’s a very paradoxical idea to declare in a public forum that you’re a coward."
• The spoken-word intro to "Los Angeles" on the Venue Songs DVD points out the venue's contradictions.
• Triops Has Three Eyes - The video shows a magazine entitled Li'l Giants.

See also

• No! (Theme)
• Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, Onomatopoeia, and Puns for other forms of wordplay